by Firedroid

Archive for August, 2011

Even without any professional knowledge of interfaces or interaction design… an interface has to be made.

In the game itself the most important things are buttons that resemble the fans and the time control panel. The GUI has to look like its part of the game, not just some buttons that were ‘just’ placed there. To match the look and feel of the game I wanted to implement wooden planks. After doodling some shapes on paper, I came up with some rough digital sketches.

Just wooden planks seemed to plain, so I added some golden details to make it more ‘chique’. Although I like the idea behind the third one, it isn’t really practical or logical with the buttons in place.
At first I thought that a ‘heavy’ non-transparent GUI would fit the game best. So I came up with the following ideas.

I preferred the second one, once again because I thought that ‘just’ two planks were too plain and it didn’t fit the setting of a wealthy transport company.
Combining the time control and the background for the fan buttons, I came to the following GUI layout:

I left out the golden corners of the time control panel, because the gold just was too much with the background for the fan buttons having that much gold as well.

A few weeks ago, I went back to the drawing board. The GUI was too present and it turned out to be quite unhandy in the levels in which the player cannot use the jump pad. The GUI maintains its size, even though it has less content. We needed a more transparent GUI, which actually is more used by gamedevelopers for mobile/tablet games. I came up with this:

And of course all the buttons needed their own different states, an overview: